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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to zoom out and look at the world as a game at times. If you do that, and go back way more than 10 years, it feels like every country is playing terribly.

Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.

Now, not so much. If you watched it zoomed out as a game, you'd assume the powerful players all got bored with it and gave up.

Of course, realizing it's not a game but real people, you realize the world collectively is probably in a better place. But it also means powerful countries giving up power, which is weird to see happen.

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>Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.

This is not a golden age to look back on fondly. That was colonialism. That was the world wars. That was the bleakest era in human history.

That doesn't mean power games don't exist anymore though. The order that prevents regression to the above is held in place by peaceful competition and a threat that nobody wants to relive those horrific experiences. Yet the leaders lived through these horrors are gone, replaced by their children who seem to not have a healthy fear of the depths of depravity humans can fall to. Instead focused on personal wealth accumulation to the exclusion of all else, and if the structures that prevent global war are in the way of that well they need to go.

To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.

Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.

So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.

The United States has benefited tremendously by having global peace and free trade in the developed world. And the rest of the world generally has as well.

It's simply not in the United States' best interest to go colonizing militarily, nor is it in other countries' if the sole super power is providing stability.

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